Welcome to Professional and Technical Services (PTS) – experts in chemical disinfection for infection prevention. Our goal is to educate and provide you the latest resources related to cleaning and disinfection of environmental surfaces, medical devices and hands. As specialists in disinfectant chemistries, microbiology, environmental cleaning and disinfection, facility assessments and policy and procedure creation we are dedicated to helping any person or facility who uses chemical disinfectants.

Friday, September 28, 2018

I have a love hate relationship with fall.As much as I love watching the leaves change
colour, and don’t mind the cooler nights for sleeping, I know that cool is
going to lead to cold….It also means
hockey season starts in full force so when it’s warm and sunny outside, I can
be found often wrapped in a blanket at the rink catching up on reading or
listening to podcasts and teleclasses while pretending to feign interest in the
practice.

As noted in past blogs, the Teleclass Education by Webber Training
is an international lecture series on topics related to infection prevention
and control. The objective is to bring the best possible education to the
widest possible audience with the fewest possible barriers when trying to
access it. Here's the list of teleclasses for the fourth quarter of 2018.

For more
information on Webber Training, including a full list of the upcoming Infection
Prevention and Control Teleclasses, please visitwww.webbertraining.com.If
you’re a Twitter follower you can also be part of the conversation during the
sessions by following #WebberTraining.

I hope many of you will take the opportunity to listen to
these teleclasses and share them with your colleagues!

Thursday, September 20, 2018

I’m
female.Of course I have been on a
diet.I don’t exactly come from “skinny”
stock, but after years of trying (successfully or not) to maintain a healthy
weight I’ve come to the realization that any weight issues I have are not my
fault.They are my mothers due to her
overuse of disinfectants when I was a child.

Or
at least that is how I could interpret my battle with the bulge after reading a
study recently published in
the Canadian Medical Association Journal.According to
the study, the use of household disinfectants could increase the risk of
children becoming overweight by altering the makeup of their gut bacteria (their
microbiome) during the first few months of life.As our understanding of infection prevention
improves, so to does our use of hand sanitizers and disinfectants.

In a blog from 2014, I talked about a study
showing that different homes harboured different populations of bugs and that
these populations closely matched the microbiomes of the residents. As disinfectants and hand sanitizers are
agents that are designed to kill microbes (good or bad), in theory the concept
that the use of disinfectants could impact our microbiome is plausible.

The
study looked at over 750 infants and while I will not get into the specifics of
what gut microbiota increased or decreased, suffice it to say, the researchers
concluded that exposure to household disinfectants was associated with higher
BMI at age 3 and that children were less prone to being overweight in
households that cleaned with eco-friendly products.

With
cold and flu season virtually upon us, it’s important not to jump to
conclusions.The researchers did note
that there were a number of limitations in their study.For example, the status of infant exposure
to cleaning agents was assumed from parent report meaning recall bias is a very
likely possibility. The study did not differentiate cleaning products by
brand name or the presence of specific ingredients meaning the results lumping
every active ingredient together and not accounting for the known health and
safety issues with some active ingredients.Further, the eco-friendly products did not
list ingredients on their labels.Lastly, the gut microbiota was from a single point in time nor did they
account for any interventions in the child’s life (e.g. exposure to
antibiotics) that may have occurred during this time.

What
does this all mean?Well, we know that
chemicals found in common cleaners and disinfectants can have negative impacts
on our health such as asthma or cancer.We know that the purpose of disinfectants is to kill indescriminantly
meaning that there can be the opportunity for “bad” bacteria to overpower
“good” bacteria.We also know the same
is true with the use of antibiotics.

My
conclusion is that the study is interesting, but further studies are required to
better understand the mechanisms through which disinfectants or cleaning
products may alter our micrbiome and what that change may have on our health.

Friday, September 14, 2018

Travelling can be fun, particularly if you’re heading off on
vacation.Perhaps a little stressful
when travelling with a family, but once you get through the hurdles of security
and customs it’s generally smooth sailing.For most, security and customs is the most stressful part of the
trip.You’re stuck in lines.You never know when you’re going to pull the
dreaded “SSSS” card and get to have a complete search; body, shoes and luggage.You’re inches behind the person in front of
you and only have inches between you and the person who happens to be breathing
down your back.If you’re really lucky,
the people in front of you are leaving on their honeymoon and can’t keep their
hands or mouths off of each other.While
I prescribe that PDA’s are not needed at any time of the day, I particularly
have no interest in observing prior to 9am in the morning...

I’ve written previous Talk Clean To Me blogs about the
perils of travel and the fact that bugs can be found on everyone and
anywhere.If you want or need a
refresher of how gross travelling on planes can be, you can check out I’m
leaving on a jet plane and I
fly, you fly we all share bugs together. We all know that the plane
itself can be a hotspot for picking up bugs, and due to the
lack of hand hygiene, bathrooms, elevator buttons, hand rails etc. can be
contaminated. However, have you thought about the level of contamination on one of the
first items we touch at airports?After
we get our tickets, where do we line up?Security.What happens
there?We stand in line with 100’s of
other people.What do people have in
common?We carry or may be carrying
germs.

A new study published by researchers from Finland and
Britain found that half of the grey
plastic airport security bins may be carrying infectious viruses.The researchers took environmental swabs and
tested them for influenza A and B viruses, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV),
adenovirus, rhinovirus and coronaviruses (e.g. SARS and MERS).Of the 90 environmental samples taken in total, 8 were
from the grey bins.While a very small
sample size, 4 of the 8 were found to have respiratory viruses while none of
the 42 samples taken around toilets showed any sign of the viruses.

Similar to any commonly touched surface, this really
shouldn’t be surprising.At Toronto
Pearson Airport about 1,100 flights take off per day.If you consider that the smallest plane only
carries around 14 people and the largest carries 525 people, there are a WHOLE
LOT of people going through security and using the grey bins.Where people congregate, germs are sure to
be found.It’s unrealistic to think
that the bins are going to be cleaned and disinfected between uses.An airport is not a hospital.We can hope that they are cleaned daily, but
the likelihood is that they’re only cleaned when visibly dirty.It’s up to us to protect ourselves.Wash your hands or use the hand sanitizer
that is very likely hanging on your briefcase, your purse or laying at the
bottom of your bag.

Saturday, September 8, 2018

With the start of school most of us are preprogrammed to
believe that summer is over.Summer is a
time of indulgence, a time to let your hair down and enjoy.Unfortunately for some of us that means come
fall our clothes may fit a bit differently than the last time we wore
them!We’ve lost the battle to the
bulge.

What other battles are we loosing as we go about our daily
routines?I think we can all agree that
hand sanitizers have become a staple in our lives.They’re in our children’s lunch bags, in our
purses, attached to our briefcases and probably stashed in places we’ve
forgotten about.It’s because of this
rampant use of hand sanitizers that a recently published study I came across is
so interesting.Conducted by a group of
researchers in Australia, “Increasing
tolerance of hospital Enterococcus faecium to hand-wash alcohols”is something you may want to read.

Antibiotic resistance is a well-known phenomenon.It occurred as a result of widespread and
overuse of antibiotics prescribed to patients.With hand sanitizers moving to mainstream use within the community and
not just in healthcare facilities have we potentially repeated history and will
start to see resistance of pathogens of concern to hand sanitizers?According to this study that very well may be
the case.The study investigated 139
samples of Enterococcus faecium.The samples were subjected to different
strengths of alcohol ranging from 23% to 70%. The samples had been taken over a
19 year period (1997 – 2015) and they found that samples from 2010 on were
10 times more resistant to alcohol.Could
this be in part an explanation to the increased numbers of HAIs associated with
Enterococci?The development of
resistance to hand sanitizers would certainly complicate our infection control
practices.Additional measures or
procedures would need to be put into place to reduce the risk of further
resistance development.

Before we cry wolf, this is the first study to show such an
occurrence.While both interesting and
concerning we can’t jump to conclusions.That said, I hope that we have learned from our past mistakes and take a
more serious look to determine if this truly is happening and if it’s happening
on a global basis we seriously contemplate what we need to do to slow the
resistant development down. Enterococci
are as we know widely resistant to multiple antibiotics.Hand hygiene and surface disinfection is our
first line of defense when it comes to infection prevention.Alcohol is used in lower concentrations in
many of the surface disinfectants we use.We cannot afford to have our hand hygiene or surface disinfection
products develop resistance or we’ll really be up the creek without a paddle!